Our favorite software for playing all kinds of multimedia content is already quite mature. In past releases, I think we've seen up to 7 or 8 maintenance updates, but here we are, on the cusp of Kodi 22 Piers, and Kodi 21.3 has just been released . The news hasn't appeared on the official blog yet, but it is on their GitHub repository , where, in addition to the new features, we can download the source code. It's worth noting that at the time of writing, there are no installers available, not even for Windows, but they will be uploaded soon.
If you're expecting major new features, keep waiting. Those will arrive in Kodi 22, currently in Alpha , and at the moment they don't seem likely to be very significant. As we said, the software is already quite mature, although I wouldn't mind if they updated the official skin . What follows is the list of new features in Kodi 21.3.
What's New in Kodi 21.3
The new update comes packed with improvements and fixes that are noticeable in both the visual experience and overall performance. On the video side, HDR support has now been added to Xbox One , something many users have been requesting, and several issues with Blu-ray playback on Linux have been fixed , including the annoying audio and subtitle errors when resuming playback . HDR10 metadata handling has also been improved for more accurate light representation, and subtitle selection has been adjusted to work correctly with two-letter language codes (ISO 639-1).
Regarding the video library and its management , the update process is now faster and more efficient. The issue that caused files with multiple episodes to overwrite the first one has been resolved, and errors in the information dialogs for certain alternate movie versions have also been corrected , eliminating some false positives in the detection process.
Music section
The music section also receives attention: searches on CDDB now work correctly thanks to the integration with the Gnudb.org API , and searches for albums by artist name no longer fail , something that affected quite a few users.
In audio , a rare bug that could cause Pipewire to crash when connecting or disconnecting devices has been fixed. Additionally, the PVR system (for watching or recording live TV) no longer closes unexpectedly when a stream from a remote app is stopped.
Other improvements
Peripheral improvements now include support for Turkish keyboards in Linux , fixes for issues enabling or disabling Pulse-Eight CEC adapters , and adjustments to the alternate Delete and Insert keys in macOS. Minor visual glitches when managing external devices have also been addressed.
The add-ons system receives a curious fix: a bug that prevented updates to add-ons after 25 days of inactivity has been resolved, extending that limit to about… 68 years (yes, literally).
On the visual side, unexpected closures when opening several dialogs at the same time have been corrected, the sleep window that sometimes remained open when reactivating the system has been adjusted, and touch support on the sliders has been improved.
Finally, the network section is also improved: support for basic HTTP authentication is added , some bugs in transmissions interrupted by HTTP/2 are fixed , and the network libraries are updated, including libnfs to version 6 and Mozilla CA certificates to the latest package (July 15, 2025).
Kodi 21.3 will arrive soon on Flathub, and later in official repositories.
For Linux users, the official build or version is the one available on Flathub , which will soon be updated to version 21.3. Later, the packages in the official repositories of the various Linux distributions will be updated. A snap package and an AppImage are also available , both containing all the necessary software, but these are not official and are not supported by the Kodi Team.